My mother was deaf and
dumb. It was very lonely at times when my father was away. I loved a
boy--a good boy, and he was killed breaking horses. When I was twenty-
one years old my mother died. It was not good for me to be alone, my
father said, so he must either give up the woods and the river, or he or
I must marry. Well, I saw he would not marry, for my mother's face was
one a man could not forget."
The old man stirred in his seat. "I have seen such," he said in his deep
voice.
"So it was I said to myself I would marry," she continued, "though I had
loved the Boy that died under the hoofs of the black stallion. There
weren't many girls at the Jumping Sandhills, and so there were men, now
one, now another, to say things to me which did not touch my heart; but I
did not laugh, because I understood that they were lonely. Yet I liked
one of them more than all the others.
"So, for my father's sake, I came nearer to Dennis, and at last it seemed
I could bear to look at him any time of the day or night he came to me.
He was built like a pine-tree, and had a playful tongue, and also he was
a ranchman like the Boy that was gone. It all came about on the day he
rode in from the range the wild wicked black stallion which all range-
riders had tried for years to capture.
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